Selective conscience
The Senate is expected to vote on Monday night, after we have gone to press, on Victorian Liberal MP Kevin Andrews' bill to overturn the Northern Territory law permitting voluntary euthanasia. Indications are that the Andrews bill, which passed the House of Representatives last year, will win by a narrow majority. All parties are allowing their senators a conscience vote on the bill — the first time this has happened in the Senate in more than a decade.
The issue is quite straightforward. It involves whether the Australian state should be a secular one, or should enforce the dictates of one or another religion on citizens who do not share those views.
The Northern Territory act allows terminally ill individuals to receive assistance in voluntarily ending their own lives. The Andrews bill would overturn that law, not because its operation harms any other person's legitimate interests, but because suicide offends the religious beliefs of the bill's supporters.
If the majority of people in Australia don't share that religious conviction — and polls show that a big majority don't — tough luck: this bill is about divine right, as interpreted by Andrews and his co-thinkers, chiefly the cabal of right-wing fundamentalist MPs known as the Lyons Forum. It's the same attitude that, in other times and places, has legislated mandatory church attendance and prosecuted those who don't believe in the state religion.
The parliamentary debate, last year and now, has involved considerable prating, most of it hypocritical, about the "sanctity of life". What about the sanctity of life on Bougainville, where upwards of 10,000 people have died involuntarily, at least in part because of Australian government assistance to the Papua New Guinea military: have any of the Andrews bill's supporters voted against that military aid? Did any of them make a stand for extending the lives of many Australians by voting against the last budget and its cuts to medical funding?
No, on those questions, the parliamentarians didn't allow their consciences to decide how they would vote. They followed the party line, which is to support the interests of big business regardless of how many Bougainvilleans or working people in Australia it kills. Only when it's a matter of forcing others to obey one's own religion are the consciences let out of their box for the day. They can certainly use the exercise.